Membership & Belonging

How people join, how they are turned down, and how they leave — the process that protects the joiner as much as the community.

Communities describe their membership process in the language of welcome, and it is genuinely meant. It is also a screening process running in both directions, and reading it that way makes it far more useful.

The four stages

Guest. A short stay, usually paid, on the community’s terms. A look, not an application. Most communities have a fixed guest programme precisely so that being interested obliges nobody to anything.

Visitor . A defined period, often a few weeks, living roughly as a member does: on the work rota, at the meals, in at least one meeting. This is where most of the mutual assessment happens.

Provisional member . Months rather than weeks. Real obligations and usually a financial commitment, but not the full stake, and either side can still stop.

Full member. The stake, the vote, and whatever the agreements say about exit.

Durations vary enormously and there is no standard. What is fairly consistent is the shape: a short look, a longer trial, a probationary stretch, then commitment.

A process that is actually published

Generalities are cheap here, so it is worth reading one real process rather than a description of processes.

Twin Oaks in Virginia runs a three-week visitor period. Prospective members are interviewed by the Membership Team about their life history and how they handle conflict and disagreement. After the stay, visitors leave for an input period, during which every member gives an assessment in one of three forms: accept, visit again, or reject. The Membership Team then makes the final determination.

Three features of that are worth copying anywhere.

Everyone has a say, but a body decides. A whole-community vote on a person becomes a popularity contest; a small team with the community’s input has to give reasons.

“Visit again” exists. A process with only yes and no forces a premature answer. A middle option lets a community say we don’t know yet, which is usually the truth.

The decision happens after you leave. Nobody delivers a verdict to your face over dinner.

Rejection, from both sides

You may well be turned down, and it is worth deciding in advance not to read it as a verdict on you.

A good refusal is timely, specific enough to act on, and does not pretend. What a bad refusal looks like is the absence of one: an application that stays open indefinitely, invitations that quietly stop, a decision nobody will confirm was made. Communities do this out of conflict-avoidance rather than malice, and it wastes months of somebody’s life.

The reverse matters too. You may withdraw at any point, and doing so at the provisional stage is the process succeeding, not failing. That is what the stage is for.

Leaving

Most people who join a community will eventually leave one, and the terms are decided long before that day.

Notice. Communities often want more than a tenancy does, because a departure may require finding both a buyer and a member — two different searches.

Valuation. How your stake is priced, by whom, and how long payout takes. The gap between a formula price and a market one is the exit number, and it is worth working out before signing rather than after.

Being asked to leave. Every community has grounds; most have not written them down. What to look for is stated grounds plus a graduated response — grounds without a process is arbitrary, and a process without grounds means the group cannot actually act.

Being suspended. The one almost nobody asks about, and the one that catches people. A member can be stood down from a role, a meeting or the rota “for now”, while something is worked out — and stay there. Still paying the dues, no longer in the decisions, with nothing to appeal because nothing was concluded. It is rarely anybody’s plan; it is what happens when a difficult situation has a pause button and no timer. Ask whether a suspension has a maximum length, and what ends it.

Nobody, anywhere, writes a rule forbidding departure. What traps people is the combination above — an unpriced stake, an open-ended notice period, a queue with no position in it, a pause that does not expire — and each part of it was put there by someone being reasonable.

RCOS · Layer 1

The RCOS Standard treats both of those as compliance failures rather than misfortunes, which is a stronger claim than it looks.

Voluntary exit must be possible at all times (§3.6.1), and the procedures for it must be explicit, documented and non-punitive (§3.6.2) — not available in principle once a buyer is found, but a standing right on stated terms. Exit must not cost a person rights beyond the ones membership itself carried.

Suspension is different in kind: a community may define suspension states, or may not. What it may not do is run one loosely. If suspension exists, its conditions must be explicit, time-bounded and reviewable (§3.7.2), and it must not be used as an indefinite or punitive substitute for exit (§3.7.3) — it either runs out or turns into something that can be argued with. Forced exit runs through the due process of Layer 4 rather than through the membership rules alone.

Read together they close the same loophole from both sides. A community cannot keep a member in a state it will not resolve, and cannot resolve it by making leaving expensive enough that nobody does.

RCOS Core v0.1 — §3.6 Exit and Separation, §3.7 Suspension and Temporary Status

Deep · what the process is really screening for

The membership literature is unusually candid that communities are not primarily selecting for shared values.

Diana Leafe Christian’s Creating a Life Together — the standard practical reference on forming communities, published in 2003 — devotes a chapter to selecting people to join you, and the theme running through it is emotional maturity rather than agreement. Shared values get a group through its first year. What decides whether it survives its tenth is whether members can be disagreed with, hear a criticism without escalating, and stay in a room with someone they find annoying.

That is why the interview questions in a good process are about conflict rather than belief. How do you handle it when a decision goes against you? predicts far more than what do you think about consensus?

There is an uncomfortable corollary. A process that selects for people who are easy to be around also selects, without intending to, for people who resemble the existing members — in class, in background, in the specific register of politeness a group has grown used to. Communities that care about this build in explicit counterweights: written criteria rather than a general sense of fit, a body that must give reasons rather than a whole-group vote, and a periodic look at who has been turned away and what they had in common.

The process is doing something necessary and something risky at the same time. The communities that handle it best are the ones that say so out loud.

Sources & further reading

1 Membership: getting in, and getting out — the stages in full, and what a fair agreement contains
2 Twin Oaks Community — FAQs — a membership process a community publishes in full
3 Christian, D. L. — Creating a Life Together (New Society Publishers, 2003) — chapter 18 covers selecting people to join you
4 RCOS Core — Layer 1: Membership System — the four membership states, symmetrical rights and obligations, and the rules on exit and suspension

Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written

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